Saturday, March 31, 2012

Why Not Try To Make Yourself Useful?

Ruckert had precious
little in the way of dining options out in his neck of the woods (a phrase,
incidentally, that he loathed, that he found utterly inexplicable, but which
nonetheless was used so often in his neck of the woods that it had become, even
for him, a helpless verbal tic for which he could think of no substitute that
didn’t somehow sound pompous), and the closest takeout establishment was a
filthy little chow mein place that --other than an insurance office that looked
like the museum of an insurance office, and a long-abandoned museum at that-- was the sole remaining tenant in a moldering 50s-era strip mall that appeared
to have once been the home to a half-dozen businesses. This strip mall was located
just outside the scant remains of a town that had been mostly abandoned when a
stretch of interstate highway was completed twelve miles to the west back in
the late 1970s.

From every indication the Chinese place was an original
tenant, and its existence in that godforsaken place, let alone its continued
survival, was to Ruckert one of the great local mysteries. He also regularly
thanked the otherwise forsaking God for its presence; were it not there he
would have to drive eighteen miles to find a place to eat. The ruins of the
town that was still home to the Chinese restaurant were a manageable six-mile
drive from Ruckert’s home. He drove there often for takeout, sometimes as often
as several times a week. And though he never ordered what he considered an
unseemly amount of food for one man, the old Chinese woman who was always at
the cash register routinely tossed three fortune cookies into his bag. Ruckert
couldn’t decide whether it was a taunt, or a gesture of generous pity, an
attempt to stack the odds in her clearly downtrodden customer’s favor. Either
way, Ruckert hated fortune cookies (the cookie part; he wouldn’t consider
putting one of the things in his mouth). He was, however, superstitious, and
thought he was somehow tempting fate by not removing and reading the fortunes
themselves.

Ruckert also felt it was wrong --cheating somehow-- to open
all three of the cookies that the old woman put into his takeout bag, and
increasingly of late he had found himself engaged in some absurd deliberations
as to which of the fortunes to extricate from the inedible cookies. Sometimes --and the helplessness of this behavior infuriated him-- he would close his eyes
and engage in a sort of shell game, moving the three cellophane-wrapped cookies
around on his kitchen counter and eventually plucking one from the bunch.

He nonetheless struggled with the question of what to do with
the remaining cookies and the unread fortunes, and had long since gotten in the
habit of stashing them in a drawer next to his stove, a drawer that was large
and deep and designed apparently to hold cookware, but which was now literally
crammed with unopened fortune cookies. Ruckert resisted the urge to open a
second cookie when his first selection yielded a particularly unsatisfying fortune --and this, he felt was increasingly the case; more and more often the
excavated cookies yielded not fortunes, but blunt statements, proclamations,
and even demands (many of which he found shrill). He had saved every fortune he
had ever received, and kept them in an
old cigar box he had found in his basement. One day, he thought, he would do
something with them, although he had absolutely no idea what that would be.

Then, during a particularly rough autumn when he was feeling
even more emotionally vulnerable than usual and found himself resorting to
takeout Chinese on an even more alarmingly regular basis, his fortunes started
to seem overtly hostile, and even menacing, and Ruckert began to suspect
deliberate taunting on the part of the old Chinese woman at the restaurant. He
couldn’t imagine how such a thing was possible, but he became more fiercely
convinced that some elaborate joke was being played on him. For several weeks
he stockpiled the evidence, and fumed, even as he continued to patronize the
restaurant.

“Those who have no luck never worry about it running out.”

“Live apart, die alone.”

“Dreams are hard to catch once they disappear.”

“Unfinished things - a sad story.”

“Soon you will be done. Great relief.”

“A fatal flaw is hard to change.”

“Far away. More far all the time.”

“Do what you say, or be silent.”

“Ask yourself: Why does no one call?”

“Work uncomplainingly, and without reward.”

“A fool is struck blind when confronted by a mirror.”

“Why not try to make yourself useful?”

Ruckert was not a man for confrontations. An old colleague
had once accused him of being passive-aggressive, but Ruckert steadfastly
refused to believe this was true or even to understand what it meant. He had
heard the phrase tossed about so recklessly for so many years that he felt it
was safe to conclude that it was meaningless. Passive, he would admit to that.
It was one of his growing inventory of handicaps. And his aggression was
fierce, but almost purely or exclusively manifested itself as fits of private
rage and bellowing and knocking things around. He was also still partially
capable of considering that he was being paranoid about the fortune cookies.

This came to an end the night he cracked open a cookie and
read the words, “The just punishment for a man who wastes his life is the life
he leads.” So furious was he that he broke his policy of longstanding and tore
open a second cookie, smashed it on the edge of the counter, and fished the
fortune from the crumbs that were now scattered on his kitchen floor. As he
held the fortune up to the light under his oven hood, Ruckert noticed that his
hands were trembling and he was bleeding from a gash in one knuckle.

“I am a surgeon to old shoes,” the fortune read.

He spoke these words slowly aloud. What the hell? He went to
his computer and googled the phrase, which he discovered was some bit of
inexplicable nonsense from Shakespeare’s Julius
Caesar. He then typed in the phrase from the first cookie and got a batch of
quotes from Schopenhauer, none of them with the exact phrasing, but close
enough that there was no doubt the Chinese were either paraphrasing or working
from a bad translation.

In a rage, Ruckert stomped back into the kitchen and yanked
open the drawer containing his backlog of fortune cookies. The cellophane on
the first one he grabbed from the heap refused to open, and he twisted and tore
at it for several moments with no success. He removed a steak knife from the
dish strainer and hacked and sawed at the wrapper, his anger escalating as the
cellophane refused to yield. Next he tried a scissors, but even they proved
helpless against what he assumed was a petrified wrapper. After a protracted,
absurd, and ultimately futile effort with the scissors, Ruckert put the fortune
cookie back on the counter and smashed it with his fist. The wrapper still
would not give, so he spent several moments twisting and turning the thing with
his fingers, trying to remove the fortune from the fragments in the cookie while
it was still enclosed in the wrapper.

Despite his best efforts only two words came into view. They
were barely legible, disclosed or obscured as they were by the printing on the
wrapper. Ruckert fetched a tweezers from his medicine cabinet, as well as a
small magnifying glass --a remnant from his childhood-- from his desk. He made
a further attempt to tweeze the entire fortune into a free and clear place
within the wrapper. Unsuccessful, he was still left with only the two words --illegible with his poor eyesight-- partially revealed. He turned on the
overhead light in the kitchen, and bent over the recalcitrant wrapper with his
child’s magnifying glass. There were not, in fact two words, but rather one word
and a fragment: -ld laughs.

-ld laughs, he
thought. -ld?

He racked his brain for words ending in -ld, but given his
state of agitation, had a difficult
time.

Bold.

.

Cold.

Should.

Sold.

Old.

Gold.

Would.

He scrutinized the words again through the magnifying glass;
yes, no mistaking it, the word was “laughs,” and the phrase presented logical
and grammatical problems with many of the combining options he was coming up
with. In one final act of desperation he struck a match and held it to one
corner of the wrapper. In an instant the entire package erupted in flames in
his fingers, and Ruckert, howling, flung the burning fortune cookie into the
air --a helpless impulse-- and it landed on the counter, where it immediately
ignited a roll of paper towels, which promptly fell over and set fire to a dish
towel.

Suddenly Ruckert’s kitchen counter seemed to be a
conflagration. He fanned at the blaze with another towel --a foolish decision,
he immediately realized; too late, alas, as the flames were growing higher and
clearly scorching the underside of his kitchen cabinets. Ruckert could also see
the counter top beginning to bubble and curdle. He cursed the fact that he
owned no fire extinguisher, he, the son of a man who had run a hardware store
for forty years. He tried to remember: was it wise to attempt to douse a fire
with water? In some instances, he seemed to recall, it was counter-productive,
but he had no idea what those instances might be. Meanwhile, his smoke detector
had begun to drone at a deafening volume.

What the hell, Ruckert thought, did not firemen use hoses to bombard fires
with water? He grabbed an old plastic ice cream pail from under his sink,
filled it in the sink, and spastically flung the contents in the direction of
the blaze, which seemed to have run out of readily flammable material. The roll
of paper towels, however, were burning more fiercely than ever, and churning up
a shower of sparks and ash. The kitchen had filled up with a toxic-smelling
smoke. He filled the pail once more and this time dumped it more slowly and
carefully on the fire. This second application of water succeeded in reducing
the pile of burning items to a damp, smoking heap of smoldering embers,
allowing Ruckert the opportunity to remove his dish strainer to the stove top
and, using a pot holder, sweep the mess into the sink and extinguish it
completely using water from the tap.

His counter top was ruined; several layers had been melted
away, and the result looked like the sort of mottled, blistered, and textured
monstrosity he’d too often encountered on museum walls. The fire contained,
Ruckert turned his attention to the braying of the smoke alarm, located in the
hallway outside his bathroom. He had to fetch a chair to reach the contraption,
which turned out not to be simply a battery-operated model, but rather somehow
wired into the house’s electrical system. It was probably, Ruckert thought,
connected to the circuit box in the basement, about which he knew nothing. At a
loss, he twisted the disc free of its base and yanked the wires from the
ceiling, an action that resulted in a loud pop and flash, followed by a shower
of sparks and smoke.

God almighty, he thought, he would burn the place down yet.

Ruckert stood for a long moment beneath the hole in his
ceiling, until he was reasonably satisfied that his bungling would not be the (at
least immediate) source of another fire. He then sat down on the chair beneath
the ruined smoke detector. Only then did he realize that he was
hyperventilating and sweating profusely.

All this, he thought, over a fortune cookie.

But as he thought about it a bit longer, and replayed the
calamitous chain of events in his head, he realized that he could not view this
incident as purely quixotic. The fortune cookie thing was somehow of grave
importance to him; the whole episode continued to smack not of fate or
absurdity, but of conspiracy. Ruckert got up and went back into the kitchen. He
was appalled by the whole mess, but particularly appalled --and outraged,
horrified, even chilled-- to discover that the fortune cookie that had started
it all had been entirely erased by the fire.

He looked at the clock on his microwave oven; it was 8:22. He
felt certain the Chinese place was open until nine. He found a menu in his
silverware drawer and dialed the number. After a half dozen rings a woman
answered; Ruckert was sure it was the old woman who routinely rang up his
order.

“What is the source of your fortune cookies?” Ruckert
demanded.

“We get them from our regular supplier,” the woman said in
what sounded almost like a slight English accent, which he had never noticed
before.

“Are you familiar with the fortunes they contain?” Ruckert
asked.

The woman clearly hesitated.

“Somewhat,” she said. “I open them sometimes for amusement.”

“And you’re willing to swear to me that you don’t meddle with
them in any way?” Ruckert said.

“I’m not sure I understand,” the woman said.

Ruckert sighed. “I have a problem here with a particular
fortune,” he said. “Only a fragment of it is legible.”

He spelled it out for her. The woman hesitated again, and then finally said in a cold, deadpan voice, “You cry. The world laughs.”

Ruckert was suddenly aware that he was bent over and resting
his head on the stove top. “May I please ask you in what possible way that can
be construed as a fortune?” he said.

“I am not an oracle,” the woman said. “I am not a philosopher
or a psychologist. I give you three cookies and still you complain.”

With that she hung up the phone.

Ruckert then spent an hour sitting on his kitchen floor,
surrounded by puddles of water and soot, opening each of the fortune cookies in
his huge drawer. Halfway through the pile he understood exactly what was
happening, understood that he was trapped in a nightmare from which he would
never awake, yet he plowed through to the end.